But if you install a browser add-on such as uMatrix, you can see that surprisingly many web sites will still work just fine if you disable JavaScript (even first-party JavaScript). One example is nytimes.com.
I was mildly disgusted when required reading for freshman orientation at Akron U included a book called Nickel and Dimed. The gist was something like "get your education or you're screwed". But people made it that way in the first place! Everyone supposedly needing formal higher education in order to have any decent future isn't something that just happens, it's something the human race is doing to itself. Leave it to a higher education institution to push the idea that "this is just the way it is, do the right thing if you know what's good for you".
edit: obvs I didn't read the book, it's not exactly like I said. I think I bought the book but dropped that "class" anyway
In a similar way, stupid "trends" like social media buttons and Like buttons are just examples of how everyone is ruining the web together. These days it's the aforementioned massive JS frameworks and SPAs and of course the obsession with "analytics." In a way it's nice for me and my workstation because it helps drive up the current average affordable densities of RAM and storage, but ...it's slavery. And Google seems to be less and less bashful about it.
"you are slaves of whatever you submit to by obeying" --that guy
It does, but it also means that RAM and storage isn't available to be used for other things. Think about what you could if you had current hardware back in the XP days...
But you apparently aren't okay with getting $50 worth of smartphone, since you're demanding a ton of companies you erroneously claim to be in California expend thousands of dollars in labor to support a framework they never agreed to support, have little to no say in how it's developed, in the name of a supposedly "open" web, so that you can have a good experience consuming content more than likely for free. That, to me at least, reeks of the worst kind of entitlement.
This is, in my mind, like buying a Tata Nano, which is a perfectly acceptable if limited car, and subsequently demanding all the road ways be limited to 65 mph, so that you don't feel slow. If you want to drive with the pace of traffic, the absolute cheapest car you can possibly buy brand new [1] is probably not what you want.
[1] That I'm aware of.
Developers don't need to put in more work to support cheap phones
You just have to install an ad-blocker, and you can surf the web lightning-fast on even an old, slow piece of crap phone
Most of the content (in time spent on it) is still text (remember what HTTP stands for?), and text takes hardly any processing power!
I'm fine if supporting people with older and slower devices costs more development time for developers in Silicon Valley.